


Courtesy, armor

by bmouse



Category: Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
Genre: F/M, Flirting, Gen, M/M, Pre-Slash
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-01
Updated: 2013-05-11
Packaged: 2017-12-10 02:15:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,954
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/780603
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bmouse/pseuds/bmouse
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Natima Lang sends one of her people to DS9 to repay a favor. Garak is used to making his own entertainment.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

Five years into his exile, Garak is certain he could write a very useful book about the effects of prolonged social isolation on even a rigorously trained mind. For example, though he would like to say that he'd never been prone to outbursts of pride (excluding the civic) he's found himself chafing at having to endure a lecture because a careless bit of Federation cannon fodder had washed his dancing suit in the wrong temperature and the fabric had reacted badly. ‘Chafing’ manifests itself in estimating how long it would take to snap the surly ensign’s character given an empty room (and perhaps a pin) even while his mouth makes soothing noises, speaks conciliatory nonsense.

He runs them in parallel sometimes, the eager-to-please shopkeeper and the dispassionate interrogator side by side like two color-complementary threads with himself somewhere in between, in the tapestry, in the hand that turns the crank of the exacting machine of "plain, simple Garak."

Occasionally though, very occasionally because this is not a feeling that can be indulged, his cheerful nature fails him. The machine falters and he curls in bed with a stack of colorful blankets pulled up to his ears while the warming rock on his belly seems to have gained a pulsar's density and weight - ready to sink down through his space-softened scales and run him through.

Not for the first time he is thankful to be part of a well-engineered indomitable people, blessed with stable brain chemistry and without for example the Bajoran racial weakness towards religion. _Then again,_ his mind helpfully argues the counterpoint _who are you in this scenario if not the humbled penitent worshipper, with Tain as your all-knowing, pettily vengeful, unappeasable God._

That gets a small bitter smile on his face, the covers flung back, his feet out of bed onto the uncomfortably cold floor.

Today is most unsuitable for wallowing, he has someone to meet. Professor Lang has recently risen in his estimation a cut above your average amateur cult-of-personality dissident. She is well aware of her debt and had sent him a message in regards to repaying it. Three favors for three lives, a symbiosis that would have been unthinkable without the oddity of his current situation. Perhaps she has realized that it would take a better class of prey to get him anywhere with Central Command. Or perhaps the knowledge that she owes her every breath to the whim of a man like him ruins her sleep. Either way she has been quite prompt in trying to rebalance the situation. What an admirable woman! In one thing, (and one thing only) it seems Quark has something approaching taste.

So today, on her way to repair some Cardassian infrastructure on Bajor an engineer with dissident sympathies will be tempted by the available shops and patronize his humble establishment. If she leaves a data rod inside the pocket of a lovely new plum jacket that she just had to try on well, Odo will never find out.

Garak sips delicately at his replicated fish juice and considers the contradiction now inherent to him seeing other people of his species. On one hand, a precious chance to feel part of a greater whole. To reaffirm something that his mind knows but the subconscious slowly forgets the longer he is trapped here surrounded by these aliens, that proper people look like him. That he is not some kind of rare fantastical beast in the Promenade menagerie but, on the outside anyway, an ordinary man.

On the other hand, most Cardassians that come to the station are likely to try and kill him. Or worse, to marvel at his fall from influence and gloat like that insipid vole Toran. Consequently, some Cardassians who visit the station come very, very close to never leaving it. Their saving grace is that he resents being used as a Central Command clean up vehicle for defective officers.

He is a tailor, not a janitor.

If some of them leave with unpleasant surprises in their shuttle wiring, well he _is_ a saboteur and needs the practice.

With the long-established habit of a solitary child used to making his own entertainment Garak considers the next span of hours, turning it this way and that, uncoiling it. There’s something there, his instincts tell him. There is some linchpin to the day that if he can only figure it out it can be saved.

For example, consider this line of thought: What is the engineer who will come expecting?

He doesn’t have to think long.

A wreck, she is expecting a wreck. A cringing broken man stinking of third-rate kanar and neglect. With ragged claws and eyes twitching to every corner, back twisted with fear of little Bajoran knives. Propaganda would allow no less.

He sets the empty cup down. Both corners of his mouth curl up to make a fiendish smile.

The morning, which had been about as welcome as a frozen wasteland when he woke up actually passes quite pleasantly. He draws a real water bath and afterward blinks critically at the self in the mirror. All is not lost. His face has always been a little too round but now that he has grown into the family's heavy frame the two make a pleasing balance. A pity he hadn't been born two generations ago when the ability to wrestle down an unbroken riding hound had been valued over prominent cheekbones.

First he uses a rough Vulcan fabric usually used to polish crystals to gently buff a faint shine into the scales of his brow ridges and neck. They once had a nice teal undertone that years of less-than-ideal temperature and air quality hadn't quite removed. A fanciful man might think that even his body conspires to resist exile, refuses to forget the Homeland's sun. Garak decides that he can allow himself to be fanciful today, it’s the last thing she’ll expect from a man in his position.

He brushes an extra fifty strokes through his crest of hair, he files a fresh, downright coquettish edge on his teeth.

The final touch is a drop of blue at his forehead. It is a hair's breadth away from too much but he has the eye color to make it work. Besides, the Rattosk festival was last week and technically he would have been obligated to mark himself a single man of good health and dance with partners in the appropriate age range.

Today the padded thermal underlayer that he mockingly thinks of as his prison uniform is left in the drawer, which closes with a satisfying click, even as he resigns himself to being a little chilled for the rest of the day. Fashion is a demanding mistress, any tailor could tell you that.

 

Before he leaves his quarters he gives himself back as a treat the extra sliver of height he usually slouches away to help keep in character and when he stalks smoothly, silently, out of the back room and towards her the woman _gapes._

 

What follows is rather delightful. Her initial bafflement is a joy to watch but to her credit she rallies well and soon, after a few wittily probing attacks, they're flirting outrageously. For a time it's obvious that she's forgotten her mission, every warning Professor Lang gave her, and they drift for an hour through several topics. Their feet circle each other, dancing, briefly carrying them to some parallel fantasy universe where something between them is possible, both of them cheerfully complicit in the lie.

At least he's completely certain that he is the most interesting man she's met all year and for months she'll think about today and get a pleasant thrill down her spine at her own daring.

While in return he feels... light? Present, the way he does with his few conversational partners, the way it’s difficult to be with his customers?

She laughs at something he’s said about hamfisted Federation data converters that is also a veiled reference to their aggressive expansion into the quadrant. For a moment, the illusion wears thin. He is wasted here, and when he was so good at gatherings, government fetes and private salons; just as happy to weave through the crowd as a junior aide as to charm enemies and subordinates at the ones that were held in his honor. Naturally, these thoughts don’t reach his face. 

With every word, every entranced look in her eyes, every unguarded flash of her throat he kindles the entirely baseless hope that he can come out of his exile undiminished. That someday he can put aside the shopkeeper and slip back into the skin of who he was before. For the next exchange he will have Professor Lang send someone else. That is the best way he can think to convey his appreciation of this pleasant hour with a friendly face, this feeling that could almost be gratitude.

Eventually, with genuine regret she plucks the plum jacket off the rack and he draws back the curtains to the fitting room with a courtly tilt of his head. When the engineer whose name he deliberately did not ask walks through the open doors back into the throng of the Promenade it's over. These little games work best when they end.

However the shop doors stay open.

On the other side, one foot just inside the motion detector box, frozen as a _kithyl_ about to bolt stands Dr Bashir. His lovely exotically two-colored eyes are wide with surprise and Garak has a moment of regret that one of the senior staff saw even the innocent-looking endpoint of this little exchange but then dismisses it as an acceptable risk. Even if he saw anything, Dr Bashir will wonder more about the cultural context of what he’s seen than the actual truth of the matter and if he drops enough hints to give a layering there it should be a sufficient distraction.

Still it is perhaps a trifle embarrassing that he doesn't know exactly how long the good doctor was standing there. His scent is so familiar, especially since he has stopped using the jarring colognes popular among hopeful young males of his species. _Then again am I really any better today with my little fit of vanity - with my thin-layered clothes and my one drop of blue. Victory is yours my young friend, you have caught me out_ and he gives as a reward his genuine reaction to the moment: a smile half-rueful half-amused and a fluid, ironic bow.

"Good afternoon, Doctor! How may I be of service?" By the time he straightens up the other man seems to have found his tongue.

"Err well. Lunch is quite busy today so... well... dinner?"

Or at least some portion of his tongue.

A flush, probably embarrassment at having found his companion without his full dignity, sits charmingly on his cheeks through their entire brief exchange. Garak watches him with fondly narrowed eyes as he steps and almost trips backwards into the crowd, managing to dodge and slide around a pair of arguing Bolians with miraculous, unexpected grace. How amusing, he's looking forward to see what opinion the dear Human's oddly programmed brain will form about what he's seen and how subtly he'll try to question him about it in the comfortably dim upstairs of Quark's.

No, today will be a good day. He’s made it so. He’s won.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This was labeled in my WIP folder as 'Garak cheers himself up by doing his makeup and trolling people' I'm not sure what's wrong with me. Expect Bashir POV in chapter 2.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Julian tries to process what he's seen.

Julian Bashir mindlessly steps 24.3 standard galactic inches to the right to dodge an ensign with a stack of circuit boards, tilts his head 7 degrees to avoid doing harm to some hard-to-gender humanoid’s very large hat. His heart is pounding in this fingertips, up the artery in his neck. If he concentrates he can almost feel each beat subtly rearranging the hairs on his head.

_What the devil was that?_

Well, Garak obviously, along with his daily scheduled episode of brain-to-mouth static.

Except he’d never seen him like that.

The shop had been dimmed, the colors of the racks behind Garak and the woman had glowed like a backdrop of coals. Soft, limited light had flowed down, caught in the suddenly silver edges of his scales, traced graceful splines through his hair. He’d been wearing a shirt, just a long-sleeved shirt and not one of his padded tunics and Julian had been amazed and slightly disturbed to see what the stretch of the fabric suggested; the armored ridges over the spine, the completely inhuman curves of too many ribs. He’d gotten so used to his face, to his large fluttering hands being the only bit of visible skin that it was difficult to imagine any connective tissue between them as not being made out heavy cloth and camouflaged by some avaunt-garde pattern.

He might never have that difficulty again.

Standing there, being still in a way people wouldn’t guess he knew how, he drank in the sight of what he suspected was a performance for once not put on for his benefit. Something he wasn’t supposed to see at all. How often had he wanted to have some new secret of Garak’s to add to his small precious store of them? And of course, of course even having stumbled on a semi-unguarded moment all he had were more questions.

__  
Why have I never seen him with his shoulders down and back? With that proud tilt to his chin?  
Everything I know up until now, everything he’s ever said about Dukat, suggests that he hates posturing and thinks it’s beneath him and then there he was making spirited conversation with the body language of a young man. ( She ate it up didn’t she, forget surveillance I ought to get some tips on flirting.) 

_Is /that/ how he had been on Cardassia?_

_Is that how he’d normally move and does he have to think about it all the time? To dial it down, like I do?_

_I know he likes to play the aged platonic scholar when he’s with me and isn’t that convenient. All everyone else in the Replimat sees is slow, careful, bookish Mr. Garak - humbled and past his prime. It must be terrible, fitting yourself into that every morning. I’ve suspected it haven’t I, you think I’d be happier seeing a theory confirmed._

_And why do I get so many of his tight-lipped smiles while apparently he has a separate arsenal for pretty women of his own species? Really, Garak? I have your bio-scans, I know where your teeth are and like I give a damn if they’re sharp.  
_

The end-of-lunch crowd seems faded and washed of details as he slips smoothly through it. His brain has more important things to work on. His breath is long and deep in his lungs.

Breath and it’s literary uses was what he’d come to talk about. Last week for their book exchange he’d begged for something “recent, damn it!” and Garak had scoffed at his sudden interest in “adolescent, pedestrian art ” and then immediately produced a thin little data rod containing a choice anthology of the very same out of a pocket in his sleeve before he’d even got riled up for a good argument.

Breath-poems were popular now in the universities on Cardassia Prime. Composed on the spot in a public setting they were said in a single breath with the goal of capturing an epiphany, a moment of emotional clarity even though in deference to Cardassian sensibilities the poet was free to obfuscate the subject and the setting. About 2am station-time he’d finished the book.

He had been expecting a set of ciphers (and he knew better to admit that he avoided a lot of Human poetry because reading it felt like reading something by an alien species) but so many of them had been sweetly, abundantly clear. There it was - the floating mind-state after too much studying, the burden of a parent’s expectations, unrequited love for someone you might sit by day after day in lecture but who might as well be farther than the edge of discovered stars. There exactly were the things he’d felt and more than once he’d found his mouth curling at the words in happy recognition.

It was impossible to pick a favorite but he had memorized a few to quote back to Garak... Tomorrow, when the Cardassian woman he had been smiling at will have left the station and he will have to accept the inferior substitute of mostly-Human conversation. _No, tonight, we’re meeting later tonight. God, why did I do that?_ Garak will probably laugh and declare it ‘quite obvious’ that his ‘naive young friend’ is the emotional equivalent of a Cardassian teenager and Julian will regret that there are so many books he can’t discuss at his full capacity, characters he can’t admit an affinity for because he might give himself away.

His heart rate stubbornly won’t decrease. The corners of his eyes itch for no discernible medical reason. Some blend of intense emotions sticks in his throat like a knot of many-colored threads.

 _Page ten, item three._ His brain suggests, it never quite forgets anything he’s read. _Page ten, item three _, it insists with every step he takes towards the Infirmary. Even though the steps get slower, reluctant as he reaches the entrance and some part of him badly wants to turn around and go back, to say ‘I think I understand you a little better now’, to offer comfort absurd as that seems, to confess.__

__Safe in his office Julian leans his back against door, takes a deep breath and mouths the words._ _

__

___Anthology of Recent Breath-Poems from [Redacted] Province_ _ _

__Page 10, item 3:_ _

__"Forgive me, my friend._ _

__I never quite noticed,_ _

__your loneliness,_ _

__the lovely line of your back."_ _

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [A Game That Two Can Play](https://archiveofourown.org/works/2263707) by [Jade_Waters](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Jade_Waters/pseuds/Jade_Waters)




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